His
collection also includes an
autobiography of Moshe Dayan
... and 'Hitler's War,' by
David Irving, about the German
dictator to whom the Iraqi
leader has sometimes been
compared.

April
11, 2003

An
Iraqi Official's Better Home and
Garden

Snippets
of American Pop Culture on Display at
Aziz's Mansion

By Jonathan FinerWashington Post Staff
Writer

Friday, April 11, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, April 10 -- A
bulletin board in the kitchen of
former
deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz is
plastered with snapshots that reveal a man
who led a rich and varied life. There he
is ballroom dancing with his wife. In
another frame he poses surrounded by
children in front of the family Christmas
tree. Naturally, for the man who
represented
former
President Saddam Hussein for years,
he is also depicted locked in a warm
embrace with the now-fallen Iraqi
leader.

David
Irving comments:

SO, according to journalist
Jonathan Finer (and what
do we suspect about him
that's relevant to this story)
looters ransacking the abandoned
home of Tariq Aziz found
copies of Cosmopolitan,
Vogue and my flagship work
Hitler's
War! It's official: I'm
part of President Bush's
Axis of Evil. Why is it that
ever since the liberators reached
Baghdad I have somehow been
expecting to see the familiar
jacket of my book pop up on
American television screens as
having been "found" among the
ruins. It is surprising how often
the US media -- or the people
behind them -- run with this
gag. I can think of
three or four instances in the
last five years in which that
book has surfaced in the wrong
hands. of course, I may be doing
the media an injustice -- mea
culpa, for they have
NEVER done
an injustice to me. Not in the
last four or five days,
anyway. Maybe Tariq
really did read my 1,200 page
tome. Maybe his minister of
information read my biography of
Goebbels
(more likely that the Pentagon
did, however).

SO, Tariq, wherever you are, if
you are now missing that bedtime
read, give me an address and I'll
mail a new copy to you. It's back
in print (and it always will be,
not withstanding the pranks of
the US press).

The story ran on p. A-1 of
the April 11, 2003 Washington
Post. Correspondents
tell us that it also ran in
The
Age (Melbourne,
Australia), Der
Spiegel (Germany) and
countless other newspapers.

With his big-framed glasses and gray
mustache, Aziz is widely recognized abroad
because of his career as foreign minister
and longtime defender of Hussein's rule. A
fluent English speaker educated at the
University of Baghdad, he was the only
Christian among the senior leaders of the
Baath Party. One rumor had him defecting
last month as the Bush administration
gathered forces for war, but Aziz popped
up on television two days later to
publicize his continued loyalty. Since
U.S. troops closed in on Baghdad, he has
dropped out of sight, with Hussein and all
the country's other top leaders.

Aziz, born Mikhail Yuhanna in
1936 near Mosul in northern Iraq, left
behind a riverfront home full of personal
effects that shed light on the grandeur
and the normality of his everyday life.
The contents indicate that, with all his
denunciations of the United States, he had
a vivid interest in American authors and
popular culture, from political memoirs to
the personality profiles of Vanity
Fair.

The four-story
home sits on an oxbow of the Tigris
River, near a highway overpass. Outside
the front door is a worn woven mat that
reads "welcome." Throughout the home
are understated pieces of Christian
iconography: a small portrait of
Christ, a Virgin Mary figurine in the
kitchen and a wallet-sized photo of an
Eastern Orthodox priest attached to a
mirror in the bedroom.

Aziz's study is an airy room on the
ground floor, its shelves heaving with
writings by and about his adversaries,
such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
and former president George H.W.
Bush, as well as dozens of volumes of
works attributed to Hussein. He owns
several histories of the Iran-Iraq war and
a collection of works on the Central
Intelligence Agency, including Bob
Woodward's "Veil: The Secret Wars of
the CIA 1981-1987." He also owns several
Western works on politics in the region,
including Judith Miller's "God Has
Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a
Militant Middle East," and Daniel
Yergin's "The Prize," about the
politics of oil.

True to his role as a former foreign
minister, Aziz owns two major works by
former secretary of state Henry A.
Kissinger: "Diplomacy" and "White
House Years." And tucked away on the top
of one shelf is "The Greatest Threat," by
Richard Butler, who led a U.N.
weapons inspection team in Iraq in the
1990s.

His collection also includes an
autobiography of Moshe Dayan, an
Israeli general and statesman, and several
works on the subject of Zionism. He owns
"Saddam's War," an account of Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the
international response to it, written
by John Bulloch and Harvey
Morris, and "Hitler's
War," by David Irving,
about the German dictator to whom the
Iraqi leader has sometimes been
compared.

Alongside the collection of books are
dozens of Vanity Fair magazines and
a large glass cabinet overflowing with
more than 50 American movies on DVD. The
titles include dramas, such as "The
Godfather" series, lighter fare, such as
"Sleepless in Seattle," and action films,
such as "Dragon," the story of martial
arts expert Bruce Lee.

As for Aziz's official reading, U.S.
Marines blew open several safes when they
arrived at the abandoned house Wednesday
night and removed reams of documents,
which will be analyzed by intelligence
experts.

In a ground floor office are
photographs of a man in his forties who
appears to be Aziz's son. White business
cards bearing the name Ziad Tariq Aziz are
on a large oak desk. On the floor is a box
of cigars, a backgammon set and a bottle
of Cartier cologne. Brochures advertising
Smith & Wesson and Remington firearms
are scattered on the office floor. A
Princeton Review test preparation book,
titled "Cracking the GMAT," is marked with
notes in the margins.

On the second floor of the house is a
master bedroom with dressers stacked high
with unopened bottles of cologne: Drakkar
Noir and Obsession for men. The attached
bathroom is filled with American
magazines: Vogue, Cosmopolitan and
GQ, along with a few dog-eared
novels by Danielle
Steel.